you say, ‘That’s my brother?’ Can you say, ‘That’s my father?’ Everyone is on their own. That’s how we left. I left on my own. I didn’t know where my wife was. Later, she followed me. My son is in Germany.”
The vendor with the paralyzed hand
The evening came. Saint Simon himself vomited.
People dispersed into dark pockets of air. Beirut in the distance was bustling with light, while here the black sea emitted its mysterious monotony. When the vendor emerged from his glass stall—maybe it used to be the stall where ice-cream was sold—the paraffin color of the Lux receded into the background,16 and the vendor with the paralyzed hand looked like an old butterfly emerging, trembling, from a halo of light. His movements were carefree, his features pure. He wore gray pajamas that were as clean as crystal. He said, “I was the first person to land in this place. The beach owner told me to live here, and I did. I was fleeing from the hell of Shayah. Then others came, then more. When torpedo boats came here and struck, all the people fled. I didn’t. Where would I go? I can’t walk, so I stayed. Maybe I’ll die and maybe not. The owner of the beach comes here frequently, but he never gives me anything. Whenever he comes, he drops by and starts counting dishes, spoons, forks, and knives. I used to say to him, ‘Count on God, man! Nobody takes anything with them when they die.’ My daughters come from Shayah to visit every Sunday, on the weekend, that is. They bathe me, clean everything, cook, and then return.”
An old woman, over a hundred years old
“I’m over a hundred years old. I came from Haifa to Maslakh. I know them by their voices even if they’re masked. They take girls and kill young men. They followed us here to bomb us. Everybody is against us. Even God is against us. Our young men are gone. Our dignity is gone. What can I say? Let sleeping dogs lie. There is no Islam or anything. Only humiliation. Nobody throughout history has been humiliated as much as we’ve been. My son’s son, my brother’s son, and my daughter’s two sons are all dead. Ahmad died when he was delivering ammunition to al-Zaatar.17 Marwan died in Kahale. Omar died in Antelias, the sea. Muhammad died in Damour. When the morning comes, I go buy vegetables. I put them here, and the old man sells them. We earn enough to buy bread.”
The mother of the man with lung disease
An old woman stretched out her fingers and wiped the surface of the ground. Then she kissed her fingertips, raised her hand to the sky and said, “Thank God! God above saved them.” She meant her son and husband. “Maybe because I have no one else but them. That day I ran, I knocked on every single door, even the door of Gemayel’s son.18 Whenever I told anyone about them, they’d say, ‘Oh! They were butchered.’
“We’ve been in Burj Hammud since the day we left Palestine. Four years. Before we never mixed with refugees, we only got to know such people here.”
The violation of honor. Honor—honor is the obsession. The kidnapping of their girls torments them tremendously. Honor replaces the obsession with olive oil in the camps. Many of the women try to give the impression that they fear and are apprehensive of the moral environment shaped here. Behind their words are innuendos of alcohol and debauchery, sometimes drugs. Here, dreams of usurped land disappear from the conversations of the camp’s inhabitants and are turned into feelings of defeat, humiliation, and contempt, sometimes with a tinge of immorality.
The woman resumed, “It seems we’ll be staying here for a long time. Maybe we will.” As the night grew darker, she became more worried about her son with lung disease, who had been summoned by the Armed Struggle and taken at sunset. For her, there was no difference between him being summoned and him being taken. What mattered to her was that armed men and the authorities came and took him. “We’ve been here for four years and they’ve never summoned him. What do they want from him? I’m scared.” Worried, she twisted in her seat. Her mind strayed; her words were scattered. Everyone here feels surrounded by spies. The chalets don’t provide them with a feeling of security. A belief that people are eavesdropping, prying, prevails. The adjacent sea becomes a sky and horizon of the unknown and its impending invasion. Everything is possible. Assassination is likely. It’s the spirit of apprehension that pervades the world of smugglers, especially now that the Amal movement—which they don’t trust at all—is expanding around them. Before we left this woman, her son with lung disease returned, safe and sound.
Umm Bassam
At night we visited Umm Bassam, the daughter of Abu Khalid, the man who ripped open the wall separating the two saints. He had set her up in the last chalet of Saint Michel, next to himself in the first chalet of Saint Simon.
When we entered, Umm Bassam had set many dishes for dinner on the floor. Her sons sat around them and she started serving beans and rice.
As soon as she finished filling the plates, a man showed up as if by appointment—he said, “I heard you have beans and rice, so I came for dinner.” He sat by one of the dishes. Everybody was engrossed in the food. There was one full plate that remained untouched. I wondered if Umm Bassam had served it for her husband, missing for years, in the hope that he might suddenly return to find his dinner hot.
“I thought he went to Burj Hammud. The next day, a Tuesday, the Phalangists came to the mill. In the afternoon. . . They came to the mill. Around half past ten at night, I looked up and suddenly found Eissa, my husband, with us. ‘What?’ I said to him, ‘You came back?’ He said, ‘There was fighting. I couldn’t go.’ I asked him to come closer. He did. I gave him a cigarette. I don’t remember whether he finished it or not. The Phalangists summoned him. They took my husband and two other men; I haven’t heard anything of him since. They also took two women and one girl at the time. The women weren’t gone long. One stayed forty-five minutes, the other an hour, the girl an hour-and-a-half.
“The girl returned crying. We gave her a piece of cloth. Instead of putting it underneath her, she put it on her head, over it. She sat there with her face covered for around three hours, crying. When she complained to one of the guys, he said to her, ‘Do you know the man who did this to you?’ She replied, ‘I know him.’ He loaded the gun and said to her, ‘Come with me.’ She went with him, but she never came back.
“I saw him twice in my dreams.
“Once there, at the door to the house. I said, ‘You deserve it, I sent you to Burj Hammud. What brought you back to the Phalangists?’
“In the second dream, he’d been released through mediation. He was totally transformed. He stood in front of our house. I said to him, ‘First, thank God you were released. Second, who was there with you? Tell us so we can get him released.’ He said, ‘I don’t know any of them except Ahmad, son of Yousef the Khalili.’”19
While crossing through the ripped open wall separating the two saints, I watched a girl dance for a group of her female friends to the sound of Arabic music coming from the television.
Ghazi, who was hosting us, commented, “These people are from Beirut’s poverty belt in the suburbs. They live in constant misery. Their Bedouin origins just barely keep them from falling apart. There is a rift between them and the leadership. The leadership didn’t succeed in achieving the fighters’ ambitions. That’s why, as you see, they’ve lost their sense of security and suffer from rising prices. They wonder why they fought.”
I spent the night at Ghazi’s chalet. I lay down on a military bed under gray blankets that had an odor. Ghazi turned out the light, and I plunged into confusion and darkness. I awoke very early. Looking out the window, I was stunned by the sight of children in blue school uniforms. Watching the children under the cloudy morning sky, as they crossed small puddles left by last night’s rain, was like remembering a good dream. I wondered if I should focus on Umm Bassam’s family, structure the film as a cinematic diary of Saint Michel and Saint Simon, telling the story of getting up early, what they do, what they dream, what they eat, the rain, the sun, the missing father as described by his kids, the lost salary or allowance. I was determined to look around and do more research.
When I asked about the beautiful nursery school in the camp, they answered that it’s